Don't let's get too carried away by today's Home Office statistics (pdf) on violent death, which show that Cumbria is the safest place to live in England and Wales. This is the county, after all, of Miss Cranswell and the Croglin vampire and Archibald Hall, the evil butler loading bodies into his car boot at Newton Arlosh.

On a wind-howling night in the Lake District you can snuggle up, shivering, with many more such tales: the Chinese bride Wai Sheung Siu Miao, garrotted on honeymoon in Borrowdale, or the Lady in the Lake whose weighted corpse was found because it snagged on a ledge in otherwise fathomless Wastwater.

When George Orwell wrote his satirical Decline of the English Murder for Tribune in 1946, he half-mockingly pined for such graphic events, because the powerful emotion involved marked them out as extraordinary; literally out-of-the-ordinary in a generally stable society that knew the rules. Victorian Britain, whose murders he pretended to particularly rate, might have been "an all-prevailing hypocrisy," but the greater horror for Orwell was casual killing. He was writing in the aftermath of routine murder on an industrial scale.

We certainly don't lack modern equivalents of the sort of deaths he was deploring in a serious argument, albeit copying Jonathan Swift's technique in that famous pamphlet urging the Irish to eat their surplus babies to avoid famine. A boy caught innocently in gangland crossfire, or a dad beaten to death by drunken yobs who didn't know him; those are the crimes which push the likes of London and Manchester to the top of the murder list and the bottom of the moral one.

Is that the significant thing about places such Cumbria, or Dyfed-Powys, which also had no murders at all last year? That their social fabric is more robust? In Borrowdale and Wasdale, maybe, but what about some of the estates in Carlisle or in the small, still economically battered towns such as Workington and Whitehaven on the coastal rim?

It doesn't really hold up. One summer night can make statistics-based experts swallow their theories, even in the prettiest surroundings.

Orwell would probably mordantly suggest that the Cumbrian death toll is underestimated anyway, because of the many caverns and lakes without ledges where missing people may lie. But it is simpler than that. When my children were small and grumbly on Lake District weekends, we would point out a local hotel where two, or possibly three (and we may have said four) people had died in a complicated crime of passion. One tragedy. No real meaning. But it spiralled Cumbria down that year's safe places list.